Republican Lawmakers Look To Distance Party From Birthers

WASHINGTON — Republican lawmakers Sunday sought to distance their party from the so-called birther issue, instead calling for a more serious debate on pressing budget and national security matters.

Real estate mogul Donald Trump had raised the issue–questioning whether President Barack Obama had been born in the U.S.–in recent weeks as he tested the waters for a possible presidential run. And Mr. Trump took credit for getting the president to respond last week by releasing his long-form birth certificate, which states he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961.

“There are a lot of things Mr. Trump can be proud of. But some of his rhetoric and this focusing on the president’s birth, I do not think is the way for us to win the White House,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R., S.C.), said on Fox News Sunday.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), a favorite of the conservative Tea Party movement, acknowledged Mr. Trump as a voice in the political debate, but questioned his line of attack against the president.

“I don’t know a lot about Donald Trump’s politics,” Mr. Rubio said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I’m more concerned about the issues that are happening back here on planet Earth.”

And on CBS’s Face the Nation, Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) said that while Trump is “having a lot of fun,” questions about Mr. Obama’s citizenship or grades in college are unnecessary.

“With unemployment where it is, with the challenges we face, let’s not have a national conversation about that. Let’s have the national conversation about the upcoming debt limit … That’s what we ought to be focusing on,” McCain said.

Former Obama White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod chastised Mr. Trump as well as the press for trumpeting the birthers’ claims that the president was not born in the U.S. Mr. Axelrod said the decision to release the long-form birth certificate was meant to point out that “we have more important issues in this country and we ought to move on.”

Mr. Axelrod told journalist David Gregory on Meet the Press, “And the point was as much frankly, David, to your industry as it was to anybody else.”

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